Gaps & Minding

I've just come home from the Monkey Birthday party. 'twas nice, although it took me quite a while to get into the swing of things, for some reason I wasn't really feeling it & making a connection with my friends seemed to take more effort than usual. Apparently I have days when I'm incredibly sociable & find it really easy to talk to people & have fun. Last night wasn't one of those days, but I'm glad I didn't just give up & made a run for it, but stayed & enjoyed myself quite a bit after all.

I did have some rather nice conversations & don't feel too wrecked right now, which is really good & goes to prove that I at least got something right. The afterparty was easier as it was less people & we even got cooked delicious food! I could've done without coming home & finding that some c**** has vandalised our satellite dish. Granted, it hangs quite low, which some drunk bastard (we suspect it was one of our neighbours or their guests) took as an invitation to rip the receiver off. It's not like we have millions of people walking past our door every day, the entrance to our flat is at the back of the building, which means only neighbours & their visitors have any reason to shuffle past. Might go investigate tomorrow, I'm really not in the mood for it tonight. I've already called the service desk & made an engineer appointment, so we should get a new dish after Christmas. Until then the damage has been very expertly fixed by applying copious amounts of electrical tape.

The past week wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared, although I came very close to killing my contacts in the agency I currently have to deal with. I've rarely seen such a shoddy presentation of research findings, I ended up re-writing headlines & correcting quite a few mistakes, only to get a very snippy reply by the boss of the agency. I think I handled the situation professional enough to show my boss I can deal with such things & don't think I'm going to use said agency again in the future if I can avoid it. I'm not at all looking forward to the official debrief session on Monday. This will also be the day when I have to present some research to the channel team - I really hope I won't have to deal with all of this on a weekend hangover.

And it's not just the Monday at work, next week looks like it's going to be fairly busy. I'm meeting up with Frani in Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park on Monday evening, got my GP registration appointment on Wednesday morning & my team Xmas dinner in the evening. My dear colleagues have decided to choose a Brazilian restaurant for this occasion as they serve huge meat skewers there & none of them feels they can live for a day without ingesting dead animals (this pleasure costs less than £20, which says a lot about the quality of the meat if you ask me). Very considerate of them indeed knowing that I'm a vegetarian. Apparently the side dish buffet isn't all that bad, which probably means loads of salad smothered in mayonnaise & pasta covered in cheese. I think I'll just get a sandwich, thank you.

I've got my visa appointment at the Indian Embassy on Thursday morning at 8.45am, after already having filled out a mahoosive online visa application. I'll have to take another half-day off to go collect my passport again, but at least I don't have to entrust the Royal Mail with delivery of it. Which is exactly where my company Xmas present is currently residing. They've sent it to my home address instead of to my desk at work & unsurprisingly I wasn't home on a workday. The Post Office is only open from 9am to 5.30pm (guess what my work hours are) & we have already established that I was neither in the area nor in a fit state to collect the parcel today. I really hope it'll still be there next Saturday, which is the only day I can actually go pick it up.

There might be a pre-Xmas bash in South London on Saturday evening if I'm not too shattered after the week. And my department's Xmas Do is on the day before I leave for Germany. I just can't win at the moment it seems.

If all of that wasn't enough, I'm in the process of a major soul searching quest, brought on by irrevocably being in my 40's now & the year in general not going quite as splendid as I'd wished it would. More of that later, I don't think my current state of mind is in any way helpful to elaborate.